I return to the metro station. Sometimes, someone has shared something with me there – though it hasn’t happened of late. At the very least, I can lie down in the dark and sleep, and for a few hours postpone the struggle to keep myself alive.
On the way, I pass an entrance to one of the great hotels on the Gran Vía. It is the hotel bar: the smell of the food hits me like an assault. I do not think – I follow it, like a starving dog. The people in here are cleaner, their faces fuller: hunger hasn’t reshaped them yet. There are eyes on me. I am an outrage, among them. But I am almost beyond shame.
The barman is a thin, wiry man with skin like tanned hide, and an abundant dark moustache – compensation, perhaps, for the sparseness of the hair on his pate. He meets me halfway across the room. ‘You can’t come in here.’
I see how he looks at me, and what he thinks I am. I think of Maria. In this moment, there is very little I wouldn’t do for a meal. I have only the haziest idea of things, but can it be so bad, really? It is just a body, after all.
‘I’m not one of them,’ I say. ‘I came to see if I could get any food.’
‘You can have some food if you can pay for it.’
‘Please,’ I say, ‘I’ll work.’
He shakes his head.
I turn from him, half deliberating as I do whether I can reach out and snatch a bread roll, a fistful of something from a plate. I could be eating it before the barman had time to chase me out. And as I cast about myself, deciding upon my target, I realize that I am being watched.
A man in a pale suit. I can feel his gaze as tangibly as if he has brushed my face with the palm of his hand. I wonder if I should be afraid. He is just on my right – I can make out the blurred shape of him at the corner of my eye. I turn. I look. In doing so I make the connection. I have allowed him in.
19
Early morning, and Hal hopes to have the deck to himself. Perhaps he will lie in the newly risen sun for a while, then go for a swim. There is something exhausting about spending every moment in such close proximity to others, especially for one who has spent the last five years living alone. But when he reaches the top of the steps he sees that he is not the first up.
‘Mr Jacobs.’ Truss is sitting at the dining table, Gaspari opposite him, a chessboard between them.
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve been meaning to thank you. I realize I didn’t get a chance yesterday.’ There is a strange law of diminishing returns, Hal thinks. The more cordial the man is, the less he likes him. He mistrusts his manner entirely. Because even when Truss smiles – especially when – his eyes remain watchful.
‘For what?’
‘Escorting my wife, yesterday, on the hike.’
‘Oh,’ Hal says. ‘Well, I didn’t exactly …’
‘She can be very determined about things,’ Truss says, ‘but, as I’m sure you have by now seen, she is also quite frail.’
‘She didn’t seem to be having any difficulty to me,’ Hal says. ‘If anything, I had to keep up with her.’
‘Well,’ Truss says, patient, ‘it might not be obvious to a stranger, but she gets very tired.’
There is something distasteful in his speaking of her as though she were an invalid. Hal doesn’t want to hear any more of it. He nods to the chessboard.
‘Who’s winning?’
‘Oh, we’ve only just started.’
‘And yet,’ Gaspari says, ‘I do not – what is it they say – fancy my chances.’
‘It’s a fine set,’ Hal says, looking closer.
Truss smiles again. ‘Thank you. It’s mine – a travelling one.’ He picks up the white queen and passes her over. Hal studies it. A tiny nude, small enough to fit in the centre of the palm.
‘It’s very fine.’
Truss smiles. ‘Evidently we share the same tastes, you and I. I was there, you know, when they killed the elephant. I have a few other pieces made from the same ivory – but she is my favourite.’
Hal hands the piece back to him.
‘I rather like the idea that this little thing, so pale and refined, has come from some great beast – hulking, shitting, crashing through the forest. You should have seen the blood, too, when we slew it. Rivers of it – very dark, almost black.’
‘Yes,’ Hal says. The piece has suddenly become abhorrent to him: an object of barbarism. He looks at Truss, who is studying the piece minutely, as though he has never seen it before. He has time to observe in more detail the sleek head, the hair combed precisely back from the brow. The short, manicured fingernails, the long elegant fingers. Hal cannot imagine him on a game drive, his clothes covered in dust from the road, sweating in the heat. He does not look like he sweats. But then Hal thinks of the ivory: the violence polished into something benign.
20
Genoa